


my heart is gold and my hands are cold

by forcynics



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-25 09:02:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6188413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forcynics/pseuds/forcynics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jenny sees a jewel-encrusted head band and Blair Waldorf over her shoulder, always over her shoulder, whispering <i>maybe I was wrong about you, Little J. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	my heart is gold and my hands are cold

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: it's all mirror mirror on the wall because beauty is power the way money is power the way a gun is power
> 
> written for the [wlw positivity commentathon](http://femslashbb.livejournal.com/12935.html)

 

 

 

A girl looks in the mirror and sees everything she is and everything she isn't.

Jenny sees _Brooklyn_ and dull blond hair and designer clothes from last season, dug out of thrift shops. 

Jenny sees a posse of girls calling her _queen_ one day, and her thin legs crossed elegantly at the very top of the Met steps.

She sees a jewel-encrusted head band and Blair Waldorf over her shoulder, always over her shoulder, whispering _maybe I was wrong about you, Little J._

 

 

 

There are parties that she’s always too young for, so she sneaks her way in. 

Her dress is silk and long enough to pool around her feet if she wasn’t wobbling on unsteady heels. There’s a tag tucked in at the back of her neck – she’ll return it tomorrow.

Blair presides over the party, whichever party it is. She’s there in the spotlight with her happy crowd of girls around her, giggling and sneering in equal measure at all the other guests that are barely worth their prized attention.

“I don’t remember inviting you, Little J.” 

There’s a tight, French-manicured grip around her wrist, and a voice in her ear that oozes false sweetness, but maybe just to cover up that she’s a tiny bit impressed. 

Blair’s holding an extra glass of champagne for her. She offers it out with a dangerous smile that makes Jenny think _poison._

She drinks the champagne anyway, sips under Blair’s watchful eyes.

Blair pulls her through the crowd back to her friends, to the sacred, gleaming spotlight. Jenny feels eyes on her all around and her skin tingles with heat.

It feels more dizzying than drinking champagne, standing with Blair Waldorf and all her minions. 

It feels like everything she wants in the mirror, in her grasp, if she just clutches it tightly enough and never lets it go.

 

 

 

Blair has a sleepover and Jenny gets an invitation with _Little J_ embossed in silver.

Her stomach swoops when she rides the elevator up to Blair’s apartment, feels like she’s stepping through the looking glass, stepping into a new land of wonders.

There are five girls there, and Blair. There’s no Serena van der Woodsen, even though she’s supposed to be Blair’s best friend.

They get manicures from Blair's housekeeper and they giggle over gossip and scandals and they drink red wine and watch Audrey Hepburn movies under cashmere blankets. It’s everything Jenny wanted. It feels shiny on the surface, but a little dull deep down, because it’s exactly what she would have expected.

Blair makes them all try on new dresses her mother designed, lazes on the settee and judges them as they strut by.

She seems bored after a few minutes, taking longer sips of wine, rolling her eyes and shifting restlessly.

Jenny tries on a baby pink dress that makes her feel five years old. Blair wrinkles her nose and gets to her feet, tugs Jenny up the stairs to her bedroom.

It feels a little thrilling to leave the other girls behind, a little special and secretive in a way that makes her pulse flutter under Blair’s tight grip on her wrist.

“Try this instead,” Blair orders, tosses her a slip of gauzy black fabric. She goes to her vanity while Jenny slides out of the pink dress, steps into the black. She looks up and sees Blair staring at her through the mirror, sees herself reflected back, too-long bare legs and her ribs under her white bra. 

She pulls the dress up. It fits her better, suits her better, makes her look older and sophisticated and dangerous. 

Blair saunters over with dark red lipstick. “Hold still,” she commands, and paints it on Jenny’s lips, tilts her head to survey the result. 

She curls her fingers around Jenny’s chin, and then she presses her mouth against Jenny’s mouth, a careful press like she doesn’t want to smear the lipstick she just applied so perfectly. Her kiss is warm and hard and fierce and Jenny closes her eyes and sinks into it.

Blair steps back and Jenny’s knees are trembling. Blair’s mouth is dark red from the kiss.

“Much better,” she says. Her gaze is sharp and despite her words, it doesn’t feel approving, it feels like it is picking Jenny apart from head to toe, devouring all her dull Brooklyn weaknesses.

“You might do alright in this world, Jenny,” Blair says finally. The sound of her name from Blair’s red lips makes pride burst in her chest, no more _Little J._

Blair smirks, like she knows the effect. 

“You just have to know exactly what you want,” she tells her, and she sounds a hundred years wise.

 

 

 

Jenny wants _everything_ , that’s the problem. 

She wants to be the most beautiful, the most adored, the most powerful, and the most feared. She wants to be Blair Waldorf, when it’s time for that title to be passed down. She wants to be the most deserving.

She wants too much, too quickly, and when she reaches for it, she leaves a wreck of chaos behind her, breaks hearts and friendships, earns disapproving eyes from her father, and worst of all, disappointment from Blair, who stares at her like everything she wants to be and sneers “Maybe I was wrong about you, Little J,” but it’s not the way she wanted, nothing she wanted at all.

Jenny takes her bruised heart and her shattered social standing back to Brooklyn, and then she runs away from there too, gets caught up in dreams of fashion as her next ticket to glory. 

Blair Waldorf was the dream, but now she needs another dream. She is not a girl who looks in the mirror and gives up, even after the wicked witch has cast her out of the fairy tale. 

Her fingers ache all the time from sewing needles and thread, and she pushes herself into it harder. She paints her eyes with thick black liner, cuts her hair jagged, and remembers when Blair kissed her with red lips and taunted her with the idea that she might believe in her.

Blair Waldorf isn’t the only dream, hard as that is for Little J from Brooklyn to slowly wrap her mind around.

There are other powers in the world, and she grits her teeth and plots a new course for them.

 

 

 

Blair Waldorf is graduating from Constance, and her minions are sharpening their claws.

Jenny’s climbed back into her family’s good graces, into Lily’s Manhattan penthouse and the Upper East Side that tried so hard to throw her out.

She watches the minions, watches the glint in their eyes and the wet of their lips and the points of their nails, and she knows they will tear each other apart to win that head band, knows that in another world, where she was still a softer girl with only one dream, she would have been sharpening her own claws and she would have beat them all.

Her heart still pangs, when she lets herself imagine it too long. Getting dressed on the first day of school next year and placing Blair Waldorf’s headband on her head in front of the mirror. Her hair smooth and her eyes bright and her posture perfect at the top of the Met steps. A flock of girls wrapped around her fingers.

That dream is gone, impossibly far away from her now, until she finds Blair in a bathroom, and there’s a jewel-encrusted head band clutched in her fingers and a sad look on her face. She doesn’t look like a queen. 

The title won’t belong to her soon enough anyway.

Jenny doesn’t remember the last words she ever said to Blair, but she remembers Blair’s cold eyes and taunting words, _maybe I was wrong about you, Little J._

She can’t remember the last time someone called her Little J.

“Are you happier now?” Blair lifts her head and throws the question out harshly between them. “Away from all this?” She waves the head band, and Jenny has to curl her fingers into fists. 

She wants it as desperately as she ever did.

“I don’t know,” she admits. She doesn’t miss the whims of the Upper East Side crowd, doesn’t miss the way the world fell out beneath her when she dropped in the pecking order, but she does miss the swoop in her stomach when she rode the elevator up to Blair’s apartment and it all seemed within reach, just at her fingertips.

“Did you figure out what you want?” Blair asks. 

Jenny doesn’t think Blair misses the way her eyes dart to the head band before she meets her gaze.

“You,” she says quietly, and Blair sucks in a breath before she corrects herself. “I want to be you.”

Blair steps closer, and Jenny steps back, and she hits the marble counter top behind her. 

“It was always supposed to be you,” Blair says, a little ruefully, and then she doesn’t look Jenny in the eye as she reaches up, head band still clutched tight like she’ll never be ready to let it go. She settles it on Jenny’s head though, and it feels every bit as heavy as the crown they all pretend it is, an impossible burden weighing down on Jenny, the end of an era and the start of a new one.

Her eyes close and her hands curl around the edge of the marble counter behind her and a long breath escapes her.

She opens her eyes and Blair is so close it makes her remember dark red lipstick.

 _You_ , she wants to say again. _I’ve always wanted you._

“Thank you,” she says instead.

Blair doesn’t smile, but she does edge closer into Jenny’s space, pushing her up harder against the counter. When she kisses her, Jenny’s expecting it this time, and she kisses back. Words stuck in her throat don’t matter; all that matters are the points of her body that are touching Blair Waldorf. 

Blair’s mouth is soft this time, but her hands are hard where they curl around Jenny’s waist, slide up her chest like she wants to press herself into her all the way.

Jenny doesn’t trust herself to touch Blair at first, and then she can’t help it, because she doesn’t think this will ever happen again, _the end of an era_ , the passing of the torch.

Her hand goes around the back of Blair’s neck, tangles in the soft curls she’s envied for years and pulls her even closer. Her other hand scrunches in the fabric of Blair’s skirt, the hem of her blouse, slips under the fabric and feels warm skin.

Blair ends the kiss, and Jenny’s mouth feels searing hot when Blair takes a step away, leaves her pressed against the counter and panting for breath. Blair smirks, but it looks too practiced. Jenny wonders when she became able to pick her apart like that, somewhere between wanting to become her and wanting to have her and wanting to rise faster and brighter than she ever could and find her own power.

The head band heavy on her head tells her she’s right back where she started. 

“Good luck, Queen J,” Blair says softly, and that’s all there is. She leaves. 

Jenny catches her breath and she turns around and looks at herself in the bathroom mirror.

Her eyes are dark and her hair is jagged and she’s stitched her dress together with her own tired fingers.

But the girl that stares back at her is wearing a crown on her head.

She’s everything Jenny wanted but her heart still aches for the girl who wore the crown before her, who left her in this bathroom to rule over her kingdom when she moves on to better, brighter, shinier things.

The girl in the mirror is everything Jenny wanted to be, but she also wanted Blair Waldorf, wanted everything she could grasp in her fingers and then wanted more.

She still wants. But now it’s time to conquer.

 

 

 


End file.
